1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data input assisting method and apparatus of a portable information terminal, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing a suitable soft keyboard of character type data which can be conveniently entered by a user to a portable information terminal, such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
2. Background of the Related Art
Modern technology development has made a cellular phone and a PCS phone (called ‘mobile’ phone, hereinafter) much smaller, lighter and cheaper. Thus, a mobile phone is very popular and widely utilized.
In these days, various mobile information terminals other than the popular mobile phone are being introduced to the market. Among those mobile information terminals, a PDA stands in the spotlight for consumers.
The PDA, in general, consists of a CPU, which is a core device of a computer, memories, I/O devices, Operating System (O/S), and a variety of application programs running based on the O/S. The I/O devices include a touch pad and a wide Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), which has a touch screen installed as another input device. Major functions of the PDA are personal information recording, storing, searching, and communication.
The PDA provides an embedded-in application program capable of storing personal contact information entered by a user through the input device and capable of searching all entries of personal contact information for a particular contact information. A contact entry is generally including several fields, such as name, address, position in company, telephone number, e-mail, etc.
A related art user's information input for a contact entry will now be described. When a user requests input of a contact entry, the PDA executes a suitable application program that manages the user's contact information. The application program outputs an input window in which all necessary fields are prepared. Then, the user will sequentially enter the proper information in each field.
If a user, who is a Korean, wants to enter in the name field a Korean name, he or she first needs to activate ‘Korean’ soft keyboard on the touch screen by pressing a special key on the touch pad or on a previous soft keyboard. As a result, the ‘Korean’ soft keyboard is displayed on the touch screen. Then, a user touches proper keys on the ‘Korean’ soft keyboard sequentially with a pen. The characters assigned to the touched keys are entered in the name field. After data are entered completely in the name field, the user wants to enter information in the telephone field, he or she then needs to activate ‘Numeric’ soft keyboard on the touch screen. If a user needs to enter information in the e-mail field, he or she has to activate ‘English’ soft keyboard. After a soft keyboard has changed into a suitable one at the user's request, the user can then enter desired information in the corresponding field.
However, the related art data inputting method must select and display a soft keyboard suitable for character type data entering on the touch screen through user manual selection before the user can enter desired data in the corresponding field as described above. Namely, the ‘Korean’ soft keyboard must be displayed for the fields of name and address, the ‘Numeric’ soft keyboard for the fields of mobile phone, telephone, facsimile, etc., and the ‘English’ soft keyboard for the fields of e-mail. Needless to say that data entering operations for all fields are somewhat tedious and time consuming.